Blogs are everywhere these days. At last count, over 44 million blogs populated the Internet, with the number doubling every five months, according to Technorati, a US-based blog-tracking site.

Blogs are everywhere these days. At last count, over 44 million blogs populated the Internet, with the number doubling every five months, according to Technorati, a US-based blog-tracking site.

It’s easy to see why blogs are growing exponentially. Thanks to various sites, starting your own blog takes just a few clicks and about five minutes of your time.

People use it to share thoughts, pictures, talk politics, or rant about whatever is bugging them. The fact is that a blog is an instant personal website, ready for just about anything you’d like to use it for.

Join the blogging universe, though, and soon you’ll find yourself wanting software tools that you’ve never needed before. Here are a few. Blogger for Word There’s good reason to start your blogging career with a service such as Google’s Blogger (www.blogger.com).

It’s free and easy and removes most of the technical hurdles that might prevent you from getting your blog up and running in a hurry. There’s one problem – to create additional blog entries, you normally need to visit the site.

But there’s hope. The relatively new Blogger for Word(www.buzz.blogger.com/bloggerforword.html) is a Microsoft Word add-in that lets you update your blog without ever leaving the comfort of the most popular word processor.

WordPress When you sign up for a free blog space, you get a variety of layout templates to choose from. If you want to move beyond the pre-defined choices, it may be time to investigate the more powerful creation abilities of a tool such as WordPress.

WordPress is a full-fledged, free creation tool and editor that you can use the product on your own Web site and domain. Blogsome Getting started with WordPress can be a bit too technical for some, however. That’s why Blogsome (www.blogsome.com) was created.

This comes with a pre-installed version of the powerful WordPress. Blogarithm There’s no better way to learn how to create a great blog than by viewing successful blogs.

That’s where Blogarithm (www.blogarithm.com) can help. It helps you track changes made to blogs that your read. Whenever one of those blogs changes, you’re alerted.

You can also set it up to alert you to changes on regular websites. Lots more blog tools The Weblogs Compendium of Blog Tools (www.lights.com/Weblogs/tools.html) is an alphabetical list of software tools for bloggers.